Viva Forever! isn’t the clunker it’s been labelled. It’s also not the thin gruel of the standard West End jukebox musical. The real problem is that it can never be Mamma Mia!, the globe-conquering, ABBA-derived franchise previously devised by its producer Judy Craymer.
It’s brash, jolly, stuffed with wildly politically incorrect language, double entendres and spoof-laden song and dance. But beneath its brightly painted face, its stockings, suspenders and corsets, its uniforms and bravado, Peter Nichols’ 1977 musical drama is revealed, in a production by Michael Grandage that is as sensitive as it is exuberant, to be both acerbically astute and compassionate. Well, as the leading lady, Acting Captain Terri Dennis puts it, “you can’t always judge a sausage by its foreskin”.
It was in Singapore in 1947 that my real education began. For the first time I read Lawrence, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Graham Greene and Bernard Shaw’s political works, becoming a lifelong Leftie. When Stanley Baxter explained Existentialism in our billet block, we nodded intelligently. When Kenneth Williams spoke Parlyaree, we were in advance of the rest of the nation who wouldn’t hear of it till Beyond Our Ken.
On Broadway, Merrily We Roll Along remains forever scarred as the Stephen Sondheim musical that ground to an abrupt halt, closing after two weeks in 1981.
If all of Loserville were as arresting and witty as its design, the West End would finally have what it hasn't offered playgoers in years: a buoyant British musical not reliant on a celebrated back catalogue or penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and his various writing partners over time.
"All this hatred is exhausting," or so remarks Will Young's ceaselessly grimace-prone Emcee in Cabaret in a comment that encapsulates the evening as a whole. Returning to a show he directed to acclaim on the West End six years ago, the director Rufus Norris has reconsidered John Kander and Fred Ebb's song-and-dance classic with less nudity, stronger voices, and lots of stage business where its bite should be.
John Wilson Orchestra’s stunning 2010 Prom celebration of Rodgers and Hammerstein was as close as those who heard it could imagine to being guests on the 20th Century Fox soundstage c. 1955... the sound, the style, the feel of how this music in these arrangements should go was “right” - every sigh, every swoon, every inflection - it couldn’t have been “righter”. John Wilson is an authority on what the great Hollywood movie arrangers and orchestrators did for the movie versions of these classic scores.
In Beatles’ lore, the Prince of Wales Theatre is totemic. Here, on 4 November 1963, the cheeky quartet played the Royal Command Performance before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. John Lennon quipped, “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery”. Now, 50 years on from the release of their first single, a tribute of sorts is taking place on the same stage with the arrival of Let It Be in the West End.
The death of lyricist Hal David at 91 is a sad reminder that the golden age of a uniquely American approach to songwriting is getting further and further away. The Bacharach and David brand will last, as will classic songs like “Anyone Who Had a Heart”, “Don’t Make Me Over”, “Magic Moments”, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head, “The Look of Love” and “Walk On By”. Yet David’s passing emphasises that although these compositions have a life of their own, they remain rooted in an era that becomes less and less tangible as the years pass.
The fright wig is instantly recognisable. Even with her back turned, it’s obviously Tina Turner on stage. Except it isn’t. It’s actress Emi Wokoma playing the singer in a performance virtually guaranteed to turn her into a star. Casualty and EastEnders will soon be distant memories for Wokoma. Good for her, maybe, but she’s the best thing about the otherwise wafer-thin Soul Sister.